- The Guardian
- Issue #2129
Capitalist climate change
The incendiary cataclysms in Los Angeles, California remind us that the root cause of the climate crisis exacerbating the fires spreading throughout that city and surrounding areas is fossil fuel production, emblematic of runaway capitalism fuelled by white “supremacy” ideology, patriarchy, and colonisation.
And while it’s easy to focus solely on the fires, it’s important to note that the associated smoke will be the main culprit in the loss of life due to environmental racism that has assaulted the public health of Black, Brown, Indigenous and all poor and working class people in Los Angeles and throughout the country.
As revealed during the height of the COVID pandemic, Black and Indigenous peoples suffered a higher morbidity rate due to decades of exposure to poisoned air and the intentional siting of pollutive industries and operations in our communities from Los Angeles to the Bronx, and Cancer Alley in Louisiana.
These communities remain at high risk because what’s happening in Los Angeles, won’t stay in Los Angeles – the smoke generated from these fires will traverse our communities as it travels eastward, and exacerbates existing public health emergencies that are consistently overlooked and ignored by lawmakers representing both the corporate Democrat and Republican political parties and their wealthy acolytes.
To this end, while we sympathise with those who have lost their homes in affluent communities like the Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and the Hollywood Hills. We empathise with communities that will suffer long-term public health impacts, including, but not limited to, respiratory and other illnesses due to years of being treated as energy and economic sacrifice zones.
Will President Biden, the incoming Trump administration, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) – an agency whose racism, classism and contempt for the poor is well documented – consider environmental justice communities across the country being choked out by smoke they had no hand in creating while billions of dollars are doled out to primarily accommodate wealthy people?
It should be noted that many of these wealthy people benefit from and advocate for the capitalist system that fuels and maintains these crises. These are the kinds of questions Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) must perpetually ask as a principled and radical Black formation; and that we must ask as a people, who understand confronting and dismantling the climate crisis requires confronting and dismantling racialised and classist capitalism – hence why we refer to climate change as the racial/class capitalocene*.
Finally, it is not lost upon BAP that, very recently, many of the people enlisted to fight California wildfires were incarcerated people, some of whose prison sentences were extended by soon to be former Vice President, Kamala Harris when she served as Attorney General of California.
This was an effort to generate cheap labour from lives she and far too many others deem expendable and disposable. There is an axiomatic nexus between how these inmates/political prisoners are treated and how Black, Brown, Indigenous and poor communities are treated in the context of the climate crisis.
This nexus extends to the treatment of Palestinian people who continue to be dehumanised and exterminated while also being displaced from their homelands due to an inferno of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and militarism. Such is the pathology of settler colonialism, which too many still refuse to connect with environmental degradation and the climate crisis in the United States.
We must and will continue making these requisite connections and intersections as we develop a multi racial/multi ethnic poor and working class response to this latest episode of the racial/class capitalocene’s atlas of destruction.
No Compromise
No Retreat
Black Alliance for Peace
* Capitalocene is a term that locates climate change within the history of capitalism and colonialism.
Australian flag and national day
The Australian “flag” as such is merely derived from an ensign, having another nation’s flag in the top left-hand quadrant, namely the Union Jack, the flag of the United Kingdom. This could indicate Australia’s subservience to another government which should be anathema to all patriotic Australians. This is particularly so to the Aboriginal people, the original owners of this continent.
For Aboriginal Australians this whole situation is particularly insulting as British government has brought so much injustice and subjugation along with the loss of country and culture. Devastation has been inflicted on First Nations peoples through disease, loss of identity, deliberate dispersal if not destruction of Aboriginal families and communities.
Currently, the national emblem represents not one nation, but promotes division caused by a mercilessly inhumane colonial conquest. For many colonial Australians, too, the presence of the Union Jack is an ever-present insult, just as the celebration of Invasion Day continues to insult Aboriginal People, who still feel enchained as many of their ancestors were physically chained up in earlier times.
Canada, a comparable nation, no longer embraces the Union Jack in the same way. Rather, Canadians show great pride in their Maple Leaf flag and heartily sing O, Canada, their stirring national anthem.
Why should Australians who sing Advance Australia Fair so proudly, not be able to salute with equal pride their own “Australian made” national flag?
Dr Kevin O’Loughlin OAM President
Ron Hall Secretary
Aboriginal Advancement League SA Inc
Shame on Labor
Foreign Minister Penny Wong is off to the US as a guest of president-elect Trump to cozy up with some of his government members. This is a president with a government of loyal supporters, and an election funded by Musk who is now at the helm.
This is the multi-billionaire whose X platform (formerly Twitter) deliberately spreads misinformation and attempts to interfere in politics globally. Witness his attack on the British PM Keir Starmer.
Labor Attorney General Mark Dreyfus is off to Israel to cozy up to war criminals and in complete contradiction to Australia’s claim to support the rule of law.
This is the man who holds one of the most responsible legal positions in Australia off to cozy up with war criminals, two of whom are subject to arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court. In other words condoning genocide!
Hang your heads in shame!
M Santos
